Produced by Joshua Morgan

Rollerblading is oftentimes stigmatized in the action sports community, and because of its lack of media exposure, the general public doesn't understand what it is to the extent of what they know skateboarding, bmx, and other action sports to be. In this video produced by UA journalism student Joshua Morgan, four local rollerbladers attempt to illustrate what aggressive rollerblading is; a sport, an avenue of self-expression, and a lifestyle.

The newest film from Warren Miller Entertainment, Wintervention, hits the Fox Tucson Theatre Saturday, Dec. 4, but if you're a skiing aficionado, you can win a stack of snow-related stuff from the makers of the film and the Tucson Weekly.

The prizes are:

One (1) Grand prize winner will receive: 4 ticket vouchers for Warren Miller's Wintervention on December 4, 2010 8:00pm at the Fox Theatre Tucson, AZ; 2 complimentary midweek adult lift passes to Snowbowl and 1 DVD of a past Warren Miller feature.

Four (4) runners up will receive: 2 ticket vouchers for Warren Miller's Wintervention at the Fox Theatre in Tucson, 2 complimentary midweek adult lift passes to Snowbowl and 1 DVD of a past Warren Miller feature

Four (4) third place winners will receive: 2 Ticket vouchers for Warren Miller's Wintervention on December 4, 2010 8:00pm at the Fox Theatre Tucson, AZ and 1 DVD of a past Warren Miller movie.

Enter at our contest page, and good luck!

Courtesy of Derek Eads, find yourself transfixed by the vortex of awesomeness:

People like to complain about online music tastemaker Pitchfork—and partially for good reason. The grades they assign to albums often seem determined more by some arbitrary indie coolness guide than the actual songs, but the site's influence is significant, creating a one-stop source for hipster music cool.

Since they rank albums on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0, and while there are quite a few high scores every month, the perfect 10.0 is still a rarity, with only 12 given to non-reissued albums in the site's history—and one of those was essentially a joke (I liked the Robert Pollard disc only consisting of stage banter too, but it's not exactly a classic). There hasn't been a 10 issued since Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2002.

Not that Kanye West's ego needed the boosting, but he's the latest recipient of a Nadia Comaneci.

From the Pitchfork review:

On "POWER", Kanye raps, "My childlike creativity, purity, and honesty is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts/ Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child, I'm fighting for custody." The lines nail another commonality between the rapper and his hero. Like Michael, Kanye's behavior— from the poorly planned outbursts to the musical brilliance— is wide-eyed in a way that most 33 year olds have long left behind. That naivety is routinely battered on Twisted Fantasy, yet it survives, better for the wear. With his music and persona both marked by a flawed honesty, Kanye's man-myth dichotomy is at once modern and truly classic. "I can't be everybody's hero and villain, savior and sinner, Christian and anti Christ!" he wrote earlier this month. That may be true, but he's more willing than anyone else to try.

Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is available in-stores and online today (and it really might just be that good).

Produced by Diana Sokolova

Erin Wilson is a young artist and photographer here in Tucson, Ariz. Wilson talks about how art influences her life in this audio slideshow.

Tucson real-estate agents beware: Sharon Lin is not going to buy a house in Tucson.

The retired schoolteacher has made it clear, in a series of comments on Tucson Weekly stories that date back eight months, that she won’t be retiring to Tucson.

Lin’s most recent comment came in respose to the reelection of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Congressman Raul Grijalva.

“Well, I certainly don't want to wake up every morning and read the news about these two while drinking my organic bird-friendly coffee,” Lin wrote. “I think I'll just visit the desert for a few weeks in the spring to catch the spring flowers and bird migration, but buy my house and just live somewhere else.”

It was the ninth time since April 10 that Lin has declared that she won’t buy a home here.

We’re not sure which is more amusing—Lin’s inability to stop not moving here, her reluctance to pay taxes even though she claims that both she and her husband have had long careers in the public sector and will be counting on government pensions to fund their retirement, or her concern that more be done—presumably with tax dollars—to protect the environment.

Occasional TW commenter RetroRV was the first to notice Lin's ongoing threats.

"Good Lord woman," RetroRV wrote on Sept. 29. "We get it. You're not gonna move here. So do it and stop whining about Tucson!"

Here’s a recap of Lin’s many promises not move to Tucson:

Re: “Luck and Fear”

We heard about the incident on Fox News about the rancher near Douglas being murdered. We saw the Governor going on TV and talking about asking the Federal Govt. for help. Since she's a Republican and Nepolitano and other federal govt. officials are saying the border isn't a problem, I bet she won't get it. The Governor mentioned that the AZ citizens will have to pay.

I been visiting AZ for many years. I always thought I wanted to retire there, and because AZ was so unique in so many ways I couldn't pin down exactly where I wanted to live. The last ten years I started focusing on

David F. Nolan, the Tucsonan generally recognized as the principal founder of the Libertarian Party and recently that party's candidate for the 8th Congressional District in 2006 and for the Senate this year, has died at the age of 66. He was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked in the publishing and advertising industries for four decades, and popularized the "Nolan Chart", a diagram to reflect a broader sense of the political realm than just the standard liberal and conservative linear metric. He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Keith Olbermann covered the stories of sick Arizonans who need organ transplants to survive. Earlier this year, Gov. Jan Brewer and the Arizona Legislature cut roughly $5 million in funding for transplants, which resulted in the loss of an estimated $15 million in federal matching funds.

We'll have more on this story in the next print edition of Tucson Weekly.

The New York Times puts one of Arizona's saddest stories of the year on the front page:

When a suicide bomber entered an American military barracks in Afghanistan in February, it was not American soldiers but Afghan stray dogs that confronted him. Target and two other dogs snarled, barked and snapped at the man, who detonated his bomb at the entrance to the facility but did not kill anyone.

The dogs were from the Dand Aw Patan district, in the eastern Paktia Province near the Pakistani border. One died of wounds suffered in the blast, and months later, Target and the other dog, Rufus, were flown to the United States by a charity and adopted by families. Target — who received a hero’s welcome, including an appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — went to live with the family of Sgt. Terry Young, 37, an Army medic who witnessed the animals’ bravery that night and helped treat the dogs and several American soldiers who were wounded.

The glory, though, was short-lived. Target, after learning to get along with the Young family’s other dog in Arizona, becoming accustomed to dog food and to using a doggie door to relieve herself, escaped from her yard. She was captured last week and euthanized by mistake.

“My 4-year-old keeps saying: ‘Daddy, bring Target home. Daddy, get the poison out,’ ” Sergeant Young, a father of three, said in a telephone interview, his voice choking with emotion. “Obviously, at first there was extreme anger and horror. Now that a couple of days have passed, the anger has been replaced by sorrow.”

Read the whole thing here.